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Linda F. Williams, MSW is a FOX News Contributor, behaviorist, Certified Personal and Professional Life Coach, author, and motivational speaker. As founder of Whose Apple Dynamic Coaching and Consulting Services, she is creator of The Whose Apple Dynamic™ GPS Road Map to Destiny™.
Linda is author of Whose Apple is it, Anyway: Empowering Purpose to Achieve Your God-Ordained Destiny; and Too True to Tell (Why What We Don’t Say is Leading Us Down the Path of Stolen Vision); and Triple Threat: Definitive Battle Plan for Ministry Leaders.

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2018 has begun, and pundits and opinion makers are predicting that 2018 will be the “Year of the Woman”. That of course, is yet to be seen. And we have heard this prediction before. Yet it is hard to deny that women have made enormous progress in the past few years.

I partnered up with my friend Cam Kashani, a leader in empowering female founders, to profile some “limit breaking female founders” and the lessons that they can teach us. We hope that you can find empowering and actionable words of wisdom from these profiles.

Who She Is and How She Has Overcome Limitations:

“Linda recently retired from a 37-year career as a federal public administrator and labor-management leader. Within three-years, Linda’s leadership resulted in turning a decades-long, entrenched, adversarial, labor-management culture into a thriving partnership of mutual respect, honest communication, and alliance.

Linda also negotiated several national collective bargaining agreements and she negotiated the largest reorganization in her agency history. Her tenure on several National Partnership Counsels, keen problem-solving expertise and ability to bring clarity to complex issues resulted in national recognition for her impact in leading cultural transformation. She holds a bachelor degree in Organizational Leadership, a Masters of Social Work, and is a doctoral candidate at Capella University.

Linda is also a nationally recognized lifestyle and business expert who has been cited in articles or profiled in major business and lifestyle and business publications including Madame Noire, Glamour, American Express Open Forum, and Brides.

Linda is the award-winning author of the best-seller, Whose Apple is it, Anyway! (Empowering Purpose to Achieve Your God-Ordained Destiny) and Too True to Tell (Why What We Don’t Say is Leading Us Down the Path of Stolen Vision).

All of those stellar accomplishments, however, belied decades of turmoil in her personal life. Linda is a survivor of sexual assault, domestic violence, homelessness, and a 17-year marriage to a man later convicted as a rapist. She knows, from experience, the courage it takes to face down the past; and she is living proof that, as she often says, “A lifetime of change is empowered by a single act of courage.”

WHAT I DO

A profound result of writing the book was seven years of shedding multiple layers of trauma and overcoming destiny-disrupting heartbreak. When I finally emerged from that darkness, I realized that, while I couldn’t change my past, I would make it count! As the founder of Whose Apple Dynamic Coaching and Consulting I turned that pain into purpose. I show others how to take revenge on a painful past by disarming emotional minefields that keep them stuck on the wrong side of Destiny’s Door.”

TOP THREE LESSONS I’VE LEARNED

1. Fear is Not the End of It: Never believe the lie that fear is the end of your story. Being an entrepreneur, I’ve had many opportunities to give up. It was purpose that drove courage to move forward. Change is a fearful stranger because it takes us down paths we’ve never traveled. It’s the human condition to be fearful at first. It takes determination to face down fear.

2. If We Can’t Face It; God Can’t Fix It: Until we recognize we have a problem we never see that we are the problem. Emotional trauma skews our perceptions. It diverts focus to things we cannot control instead of empowering the internal focus that facilitates greater influence. This intangible undercurrent is often at the root of transformational resistance. It is always best to focus on influencing others as opposed to managing human resources.

3. Our Greatest Power: Our greatest power is realized in the truth of who we are and each of us is more than enough to fulfill our purpose. Emotional trauma caused me to leave behind the little girl I used to be. I turned my back on her thinking she was the cause of my problems. It took decades to recognize that in turning my back on her, I’d turned my back myself. I wasn’t going to move forward without going back and making peace with my true-self. In so doing, I was finally all I had to be to fulfill my purpose.

ONE MORE FOR GOOD MEASURE

4. Chicken or Egg Confusion: The reason some of us find it a challenge to learn our purpose is that we are taught to follow our passion to find it. In my opinion, this is a problem because passion follows purpose. Tap into to your purpose and passion will follow.

Linda F. Williams, MSW is a FOX News Contributor, behaviorist, Certified Personal and Professional Life Coach, author, and motivational speaker. As founder of Whose Apple Dynamic Coaching and Consulting Services, she is creator of The Whose Apple Dynamic™ GPS Road Map to Destiny™.
Linda is author of Whose Apple is it, Anyway: Empowering Purpose to Achieve Your God-Ordained Destiny; and Too True to Tell (Why What We Don’t Say is Leading Us Down the Path of Stolen Vision); and Triple Threat: Definitive Battle Plan for Ministry Leaders.